Some of My Best Friends Are Putzes

Dr. Ruth Westheimer got some attention a few days ago by saying some stupid things about rape and consent in a TV interview.  Amanda Marcotte was one of many online pundits who gave her a good dressing-down.

Here's a partial transcription of Westheimer's remarks:

I am very worried about college campuses saying that a woman and a man—or two men or two women, but I talk right now about women and men—can be in bed together, Diane, and at one time, naked, and at one time he or she, most of the time they think she, can say “I changed my mind.”

No such thing is possible. In the Talmud, in the Jewish tradition, it says when that part of the male anatomy is aroused and there’s an erection, the brain flies out of that and we have to take that very seriously, so I don’t agree with that.

It sounds like Westheimer's trying to be a kosher Camille Paglia.  I'm not going to address her remarks about consent, because Marcotte and others have done that more or less ably, including some of Marcotte's commenters, who referred to their own experience for counterexamples.  But I noticed an annoying tendency among the commenters to dismiss the Talmud, though they clearly had no idea what it is.  Well, I mean, like, who cares what a bunch of dead white men said like millions of years ago?  We're modern enlightened people and we have science, which totally proves that you can get naked with someone and they can't rape you, so there!  We don't need your Stone Age Talmud!

I'm not a Talmudist, not even Jewish.  I'm a goyisher atheist, but I have picked up some shiny bits of information in my reading about the human heritage.  The Talmud is not the Jewish Bible -- that would be what Christians call the Old Testament.  The Talmud is a huge, complex text made up of Mishnah and Gemara.  The Mishnah was compiled around 200 CE; according to tradition it preserves in writing the Oral Torah, the discussions of Jewish scholars and authorities from the time of Moses down to, roughly, the destruction of the Second Temple around 70 CE.  This is probably not true, any more than the written Torah was written by Moses, or the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek by seventy scholars in seventy days, or the New Testament gospels were written by some of Jesus' original followers.  The Gemara is commentary on the Mishnah, which accumulated over three or four centuries.  To add to the complexity, there are two Talmuds, the Jerusalem and the Babylonian, but the Babylonian one has priority for most use by rabbis and scholars.

Overall, the Talmud is an archive of "legal" debate among scholars.  I put "legal" in quotes because there's a tradition among Christian apologists to see rabbinic Judaism as a system of cold, soulless legalism, abetted by the fact that the Torah (which means "instruction," somewhat euphemistically) is referred to as nomos, or "Law," in the Greek of the New Testament.  To oversimplify so we can move along here, rabbinic Judaism is a system of warm, soulful legalism.  It is, like any legal or religious system, thoroughly human in its origins, implementation, and function.  As you might guess, then, it's usually inaccurate to treat the Talmud as a monolithic authority, as Westheimer did.  There's an old joking proverb: Two Jews, three opinions.  The Talmud is, like law or philosophy or theology or literary criticism, or science for that matter, a record of dissent and debate.  My first suspicion when I read Westheimer's claim was that if I looked at the text in its context, it would be a lot less direct and clear than she wanted people to believe.

One of Marcotte's commenters referred to the Talmud and rabbinic Judaism as "primitive."  No, it's not.  In a previous post I quoted a technical definition of "primitive" from the sociologist and Hindu monk Agehananda Bharati's book, The Light at the Center: Context and Pretext of Modern Mysticism (Ross-Erikson, 1976).

"A primitive society, by anthropological criteria, is a small, band-like society structured entirely on kinship lines, which does not deploy fulltime specialists for anything" (142).  Two things about this: 1) it's not derogatory or racist to use the word "primitive" in this way, just as there is probably a definition of "tribal" that isn't derogatory or racist, but either word can be used to put down what one doesn't like in one's own allegedly "advanced" culture, just as "childish" can be; 2) by Bharati's definition there are still "primitive" aspects of modern Western society, but these are not necessarily bad: friendship, kinship, taking care of others as amateurs rather than as specialists, without expecting cash payment for doing so.

I remarked to the commenter that he might as well have referred to the Talmud as fat or gay as call it "primitive."  He countered that the Talmud isn't fat or gay, but it is primitive, so there.  If you use "primitive" to mean "something I don't like," then yes, the Talmud is primitive.  If you're using the word in anything like the anthropological sense, however, it's not.  (There are other valid uses of "primitive," as in the arts, but he didn't mean those either.)  Ancient Judaism -- the much older Hebrew Bible, I mean, as well as the Talmud -- was the product of a literate society with fulltime specialists such as priests, scribes, and teachers.  You could call it "primitive" to mean that it was a long time ago and didn't have printing or telescopes or cell phones, but then the Greece of Plato and Aristotle, or the Roman Empire, or the sages of Vedic Hinduism, or the Buddha would be primitive too, and I doubt the commenter had them in mind.

On attitudes to women and sex, and rape in particular, the modern, enlightened West would also have to be referred to as "primitive."  Modern Western science has been -- well, I'll be nice and just call it "terrible" on these matters.  Think of the brilliant scientists (both male, of course, but aided and abetted by female colleagues) who, based on their evidence-based research, recommended that young men be required to take rape-prevention classes before they were issued driver's licenses and young women be advised not to wear tight sweaters.  Steven Pinker was embarrassed by the stupidity of the recommendation but still defended Thornhill and Palmer in The Blank Slate (page 371) -- they were so not justifying rape! -- by adducing the authority of Camille Paglia.  Then remember Michael Ruse -- philosopher of science, champion of Darwin against the Bible-thumpers -- showing his complete inability to grasp the difference between rape and consensual sex, or between rape and crapping on your boss's Persian rug.  There must be male scientists who are better than this, but I don't know of any.  Advances in thinking about rape came from man-hating, hairy-legged feminists, not from Science.

Some of the commenters pointed out that women were forbidden to study Talmud until recently.  The determined resistance by male scientists to letting women work in the sciences must not be forgotten either.  (Especially since there is still a drive to erase the achievements of women scientists from the history, sometimes by tokenizing them.)  It's not really that hard to remember, since it is still with us, if slightly less virulent.  Yes, even now in the primitive times of the twenty-first century, male scientists are trying to explain away the lesser numbers of women in the sciences by blaming it on women's supposed innate lack of interest in science, or their supposed lack of compulsive competitiveness, or even because their brains aren't organized to do science like men's are.  You can condemn religious traditions for male chauvinism and misogyny, and you should; but you must also be aware of the same tendencies in Science.

Also relevant here is current scientific thought on homosexuality, which incorporates conceptions of gender and sexuality that could perhaps be called "primitive"; certainly they are descended from concepts that are ancient. As I've said before, where but on sex/gender do the primitive myths and misconceptions of the masses get respect from enlightened scientists, who seem to be under the impression that they invented them themselves?

But I digress.  When I read about Westheimer's statements I began wondering almost immediately: Did the Talmud say what she said it says, that "when that part of the male anatomy is aroused and there’s an erection, the brain flies out of that and we have to take that very seriously"?  I thought I recognized a Yiddish proverb invoked by Philip Roth in Portnoy's Complaint:  Ven der putz shteht, ligt der sechel in drerd -- When the prick stands up, the sense (or judgment) lies down in the ground.  This is of course an alibi made by men themselves, and has no scientific standing.  For one thing, the putz doesn't have a brain, as Westheimer implies: sexual desire is mostly in the brain a couple of feet above the gonads.  For another, sexual desire can impair judgment, but it doesn't destroy it altogether; an aroused person can still hear the words "No" and "Stop."  If a person is taught that he (or she) is not responsible for what he does when aroused, he will not even try to behave responsibly.  As Marcotte pointed out after Westheimer protested that she wasn't defending rape, "no rape apologist in the history of rape apologies has ever admitted to rape apologizing."

But did Ashkenazi folklore take this proverb from the Talmud?  I realized I'd better try to find out, and it turned out to be easier than I expected.  The writer of this helpful article tried to ask Westheimer for a reference for her Talmudic wisdom, but the Doctor was out.  The writer then talked to some rabbis, who recognized the proverb but didn't think it came from the Talmud.  Indeed, they said, that the Talmud is extremely anti-rape and pro-consent.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, whose books about sex and Judaism include “Kosher Sex,” “Kosher Adultery” and “Kosher Lust,” said, “I know Dr. Ruth and very much like her, but anyone in the Jewish community should strongly object to what she said. Consent is offered by a woman, and it can be withdrawn at any moment."

“The idea that men are ravaging beasts who are controlled by their hormones and can’t stop themselves is a Neanderthal view that Judaism would never embrace. It’s a shockingly frightening excuse for rape.”

Rabbi Dov Linzer, head of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, a liberal Orthodox rabbinical school, and co-host of “The Joy of Text” monthly podcast on Judaism and sexuality, agreed with Ruttenberg and Boteach. Linzer pointed to the passages they cited and also noted a passage in Berachot 62A saying that even when a man and his wife are naked together in bed, it is incumbent upon him to make sure she desires to have sex before beginning the act.

Although known for its conflicting opinions and arguments, the Talmud is notably consistent about sexual consent, Linzer said, adding that he could not think of any passage that forgives or condones sex without full consent and that “the whole issue of responsibility and culpability is a major theme in the Talmud.

This sounded very impressive. Why, the Talmud is completely in accord with modern feminism!    (Notice, however, Boteach's reference to "Neanderthal" brutishness.  We don't in fact know anything about the sexual behavior or manners of the Neanderthals.  The word has the same function here that "primitive" did for the commenter I mentioned earlier.  If the Neanderthals were contemptuous of consent, though, that would mean they weren't primitive but as modern as Dr. Ruth or Michael Ruse.)  English translations of the Talmud are available online, so I decided to find these passages if I could, and see how the rabbis expressed these modern ideas so many centuries ago.  I began with Berachot 62A online, and I cannot find anything about the necessity of a husband's ascertaining his wife's willingness to copulate there, in or out of bed.  The section is mostly a discussion of outhouse etiquette between men, mainly rabbis.  For example:

Our Rabbis taught: Who is a modest man? One who eases himself by night in the place where he eased himself by day.  Is that so? Has not Rab Judah said in the name of Rab: A man should always accustom himself [to consult nature] in the early morning and in the evening so that he may have no need to go a long distance? And again, in the day-time Raba used to go as far as a mile, but at night he said to his attendant, Clear me a spot in the street of the town, and so too R. Zera said to his attendant, See if there is anyone behind the Seminary as I wish to ease myself? — Do not read 'in the place', but read, 'in the same way as he eases himself by day'  R. Ashi said, You may even retain the reading 'place', the reference being to a private corner.

Kinky, but not relevant to rape or consent in the marital bed.  I checked other passages cited in the article.   Nedarim 20A says nothing I could find about connubial drunkenness ruling out consent, though it does contain some familiar folklore about children being marked by their parents' behavior during and after conception:

R. Johanan b. Dahabai said: The Ministering Angels told me four things: People are born lame because they [sc. their parents] overturned their table [i.e., practised unnatural cohabitation]; dumb, because they kiss 'that place'; deaf, because they converse during cohabitation; blind, because they look at 'that place'. But this contradicts the following: Imma Shalom was asked: Why are thy children so exceedingly beautiful? She replied: [Because] he [my husband] 'converses' with me neither at the beginning nor at the end of the night, but [only] at midnight; and when he 'converses', he uncovers a handbreadth and covers a hand breadth, and is as though he were compelled by a demon. And when I asked him, What is the reason for this [for choosing midnight], he replied, So that I may not think of another woman, lest my children be as bastards. — There is no difficulty: this refers to conjugal matters;  the other refers to other matters. 

There follows some discussion of anal penetration of the wife, which the rabbis generally accept because

R. Johanan said: The above is the view of R. Johanan b. Dahabai; but our Sages said: The halachah is not as R. Johanan b. Dahabai, but a man may do whatever he pleases with his wife [at intercourse]: A parable; Meat which comes from the abattoir, may be eaten salted, roasted, cooked or seethed; so with fish from the fishmonger.

Only 37A came within a country mile of R. Boteach's account: "Ye maintain that a menstruant woman is permitted yihud [privacy] with her husband: can fire be near tow without singeing it?"  This seems to me far from "the man has to prop himself up on his elbows and subside," however, and it seems to imply that the proximity even of a menstruating wife will "singe" her husband with desire.  Or maybe not.  But on the basis of these scholars' references, I can't see that the Talmud is particularly humane or enlightened about women, copulation, consent, or reproduction.  That, however, is more because it's the work of male scholars, than because it's religious or "primitive."

Because My Heart Is Pure

The most valuable lesson to be learned from Sam Harris's recent e-mail exchange with Noam Chomsky is that two atheists, both champions of science and of Enlightenment values and rationality, can disagree vehemently on issues they both consider to be of first importance.  This might seem obvious enough, but I noticed that some of the coverage failed to grasp it.  The first notice I saw of their exchange was this article from Salon, was subtitled "How the professor knocked out the atheist." That Chomsky is also an atheist is hardly obscure; whoever wrote that headline was trying to create an illusion of more space between the combatants.

I consider this more important than who "won."  Not too surprisingly, there was little agreement about that question, with Harris's fans sure that Harris won, or at least that Chomsky lost because he was mean and rude to Harris, and Chomsky's fans sure that Chomsky won, mopping up the floor with Harris.  Or "undressed" Harris, as one notably wacky headline put it.  (The headline stayed with the post as it was cross-posted to several sites.)  Elsewhere I learned that Chomsky bitchslapped Harris, that he owned him,  and so on.  PZ Myers provided a round-by-round, punch-by-punch commentary on the exchange.  So did Susan of Texas.  Those who haven't yet seen the exchange, and are interested, could begin there. I'd prefer not to link to Harris's original blog post, just because he doesn't deserve any more traffic; you can find it easily with a simple online search if you wish.

What interests me here is Harris's recent postmortem on the encounter, in which he lamented that "Anyone who thinks I lost a debate here just doesn’t understand what I was trying to do":

Harris said he had hoped to learn what Chomsky actually believes about the ethics of intent, and he hoped his own arguments would steer leftists away from their “masochistic” tendencies.

He said Chomsky’s followers believe the U.S. was morally worse than ISIS because it had, through “selfishness and ineptitude,” created ISIS and victimized millions of people in other nations.

“This kind of masochism and misreading of both ourselves and of our enemies has become a kind of religious precept on the left,” Harris said. “I don’t think an inability to distinguish George Bush or Bill Clinton from Saddam Hussein or Hitler is philosophically or politically interesting, much less wise.

... Harris complained that he encountered “contempt and false accusation and highly moralizing language” throughout his exchange with Chomsky – and he now wishes he had addressed those points immediately and directly.

...“I wanted to talk to him to see if there was some way to build a bridge off of this island of masochism so that these sorts of people that I’ve been hearing from for years could cross over to something more reasonable, and it didn’t work out,” he said. “The conversation, as I said, was a total failure, but I thought it was an instructive one.”

I agree that the conversation was instructive, though probably not for the reasons Harris thinks.  Harris initiated the exchange by telling Chomsky that "I am far more interested in exploring these disagreements, and clarifying any misunderstandings, than in having a conventional debate."  (Harris was being disingenuous about that, since he'd announced on Twitter that he was "trying to arrange a debate with Noam Chomsky".) The ensuing conversation clarified Harris's misunderstandings very effectively, and his follow-up remarks are even more instructive.

When Harris first contacted Chomsky, he now reveals, he didn't really think he had anything to learn from him.  He was already certain that he had the True Gnosis, and if given access to what he regarded as Chomsky's cult of devotees, he could expose Chomsky's "misreadings" and free his cult from their "masochistic" view of US policy and conduct.  It's ironic that he should complain of "contempt and false accusation and highly moralizing language" from Chomsky, because that describes his own contributions so very well.  Though Chomsky explained, with amazing patience really, why he disagreed with Harris, Harris simply brushed his explanations aside and repeated his original claims -- but repetition is not argument.

The accusation of masochism, which is very nearly content-free, is especially interesting.  No one, Harris believes, could have any good reasons for judging US policy as harshly as Chomsky does, so he and his followers must be suffering from some sort of mental dysfunction.  The tactic may be connected to Harris's interest in neuroscience, which is being used nowadays to explain away all human behavior as the result of conditions within the brain, not to any external (social, political, intellectual) factors.  Those who adopt this tactic (or other reductive pseudo-explanations) never pause to consider that, if this were true, it would apply as forcefully to themselves and to neuroscience itself as to everyone else.  It would mean, for example, that Harris's stance on Islam, as well as his politics generally and his atheism in particular, is also merely the product of some kink in his synapses, not because of his superior intellect.

It also has another consequence.  Suppose that all the Muslims in the world suddenly acknowledged that Harris is right that Islam is an inherently violent cult, renounced faith in favor of atheism, and blamed Islam for everything wrong in the Middle East and in the world.  Would that be "masochism" in Harris's eyes?  I don't see how it could be anything else.  But perhaps Harris believes that Muslims are Muslims due to some neurobiological defect, so they are incapable of change, and must (however regretfully -- we're all humane and well-intentioned here!) be exterminated.  Since Harris's view of Islam is so clearly irrational, perhaps it should be diagnosed as "sadism."

Clearly Harris hoped to leapfrog over Chomsky and speak directly to his followers, bringing them the Healing Light that he uniquely has to offer.  Now, I know that, like most well-known people (Harris included), Chomsky has some fans who are devotees, who parrot his opinions without understanding them.  But I don't see any reason to believe that this is true of all of them.  Many of them have ties to various traditions of political dissent: pacifism, antiwar, international solidarity, and so on.  I formed my views on the Vietnam war, for example, based on the evidence, long before I read Chomsky's writings.  I liked them because they fit with everything else I knew.  I disagree with him on some matters, and have written about some of those at length.  I've observed that despite the accusation, popular in certain circles, that Chomsky tolerates no disagreement, he can be disagreed with if you have some idea of what you're talking about; witness the disagreements between him and Gilbert Achcar in their lengthy conversations on the Middle East, for example.  So if Chomsky's fans don't immediately accept Sam Harris's Love Gift of Wisdom, they may well have reasons other than mere "masochism."

Harris's position on morality is often described as consequentialist, including (albeit ambivalently) by himself.  Like most such classifications, consequentialism isn't all that clear-cut, but it apparently boils down to "the view that an action is right if and only if its total outcome is the best possible. This is the basic form of consequentialism; there are, however, many varieties, a few of which will be noted below. What they all have in common is that consequences alone should be taken into account when making judgements about right and wrong."  If so, then Harris is an odd kind of consquentialist, because he insists to Chomsky that intent (American intent, anyway) is vitally important, and it seems to trump every other consideration for him.  No matter how horrible the outcome of US conduct, it's still better than anything anyone else does, because the United States *

are, in many respects, just such a “well-intentioned giant.” And it is rather astonishing that intelligent people, like Chomsky and [Arundhati] Roy, fail to see this. What we need to counter their arguments is a device that enables us to distinguish the morality of men like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein from that of George Bush and Tony Blair. It is not hard to imagine the properties of such a tool. We can call it “the perfect weapon.”

"The perfect weapon" is a totally imaginary concept, a weapon that can kill only bad guys without harming any good guys in the slightest.  Harris fantasizes that US officials would gladly use the Perfect Weapon if they could, thus avoiding any collateral damage whatever, and that bad guys (Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, ISIS, whoever) would reject it even if they were offered it, because they are totally Evil and like hurting innocent people.  How he knows this is not clear.  But since the Perfect Weapon doesn't exist, this is a purely speculative exercise, which is revealing given Harris's professed disdain for metaphysics and other boring, airy-fairy logic-chopping.

In the real world, we must consider how people use the imperfect weapons they have.  And oddly, Harris is rhetorically ready to concede that the United States is less than perfect.

There is no doubt that the United States has much to atone for, both domestically and abroad. In this respect, we can more or less swallow Chomsky’s thesis whole. ... The result [of our actions] should smell of death, hypocrisy, and fresh brimstone.
We have surely done some terrible things in the past. Undoubtedly, we are poised to do terrible things in the future. Nothing I have written in this book should be construed as a denial of these facts, or as defense of state practices that are manifestly abhorrent. There may be much that Western powers, and the United States in particular, should pay reparations for. And our failure to acknowledge our misdeeds over the years has undermined our credibility in the international community. We can concede all of this, and even share Chomsky’s acute sense of outrage, while recognizing that his analysis of our current situation in the world is a masterpiece of moral blindness.

Taken out of context, these remarks could be taken to accuse Harris of surrender-monkey American-self hating masochism.  But his concession has no consequences.  Like any exceptionalist (Rachel Maddow is another well-known example) Harris simply refuses to admit that "our misdeeds" might lead to anger and retaliation by our victims, especially since even if the US should atone and pay reparations for our crimes, in fact we never do.  We just keep killing and killing and killing.

Rather than a consequentialist, then, Harris appears to be quite the opposite.  America is good, not because of the consequences of our actions, which are in fact often quite bad, but because we mean well.  Our intentions not only need to be weighed along with the outcome, but they trump everything else. And we know this, not because of any evidence, but simply a priori, as a matter of faith.  Chomsky and others have rebutted Harris's claims about American good intentions, but the rebuttals bounce harmlessly off Harris's armor of true belief.  Evidence?  Reason?  Harris laughs your evidence and reason to scorn, because he knows.

To acknowledge that our actions might have consequences is not to justify any and all retaliation, as exceptionalists like to claim.  What it means is that we cannot make a great show of injured innocence when the chickens come home to roost.  I don't think that the 9/11 attacks were justified, any more than Martin Luther King Jr. was calling for the Vietnamese to invade and conquer the US when he called his government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world" in 1967.  If Harris had any principles, it would be he and others like him who called for the destruction of America for its manifold crimes; but he has no principles. America, that "well-intentioned giant," can do whatever we like, because we're the good guys.

One other small matter.  Harris whined about the limitations of e-mail, the medium through which he Chomsky communicated.

I’m sorry to say that I have now lost hope that we can communicate effectively in this medium. Rather than explore these issues with genuine interest and civility, you seem committed to litigating all points (both real and imagined) in the most plodding and accusatory way. And so, to my amazement, I find that the only conversation you and I are likely to ever have has grown too tedious to continue.

I've been on the receiving end of this sort of passive-aggressive nonsense myself: people who clashed with me in a public forum "reached out" via e-mail, in the apparent belief that in public discussion I'm just putting on a show and in a private exchange I'll admit that I don't really believe anything I say in public.  I wonder if such people are projecting; in some cases it seems they are.  "Tedious" does describe Harris's conduct in his correspondence with Chomsky, but of course he projects onto the Other.  What, I wonder, did Harris prefer?  Does he think he'd have done any better face-to-face?  Maybe have a brewski with the Noamster and just be two regular guys together?  The trouble wasn't that e-mail inhibits communication, it was that Harris wasn't interested in communicating: he was going to preach, and Chomsky was supposed to listen, and marvel, and be saved along with all his household.  In my experience it's usually Christians who talk like this.

Notice also how in Harris's followup he "now wishes he had addressed those points immediately and directly."  That's one of the benefits of having this sort of exchange in writing, including e-mail: you can take your time, consider your next move in relative tranquility, and even delay your response until you've had time to think it over.  But Harris isn't, on the evidence, interested in thinking.

* I'm relying on Susan of Texas's quotations from Harris here, not from Harris's original post, but the quotations are accurate; you can follow the links to his blog if you want to check them.

** Here I'm copying PZ Myers' quotation from Harris, under "Round 8."

The Clash of Enlightenments

Today I'm reading Dan Hind's The Threat to Reason.  (I finished Betty Smith's 1943 autobiographical novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn yesterday.  I think I'll try to get hold of her other books, and the biography of the author that was published a few years ago.)  Hind is very good.  Here, for example:

The global justice movement has sought precisely to destroy the legitimacy of at least some of the transnational organizations.  It has done so through a distinctive combination of spectacular protest and reasoned argument.  It argues that its opponents have betrayed the principles of the Enlightenment for the sake of corporate and state power.  At the same time, the transnational institutions themselves have criticized the protestors' methods and have sought to depict them as simplistic, naive or vicious.  They have been keen to denounce the protestors as fear-filled enemies of progress and unenlightened xenophobes.  Each side claims to be presenting arguments based on fact, and both seek to persuade through appeals to universal principles of justice.  The World Bank / IMF inside the convention centres and the clowns and the anarchists outside are calling for the creation of a humane social order, for a global system that fulfils the promise of the Enlightenment.  Both sides might be wrong, but they are definitely not both right, and a revived Enlightenment must decide between them or reject them both.  A structure of Enlightenment that admits both because they both claim to be enlightened cannot be of central importance to our current politics.  Their struggle marks a, perhaps the, 'great divide' in contemporary politics.  Understood narrowly in terms of a clash between the rational and the irrational, the Enlightenment can say little about one of the most important political contests of our time.

I'll have more to say about these issues soon.  I hope.

Ooey Gooey Was a Worm, a Mighty Worm Was He!

I want to go back for a moment to something I quoted from Neil DeGrasse Tyson a few days ago:

If you are one of those people who don't like thinking about astronomy because it makes them feel small, Tyson suggests looking at it a different way ... If you "see the universe as something you participate in — as this great unfolding of a cosmic story — that, I think should make you feel large, not small. ... Any astrophysicist does not feel small looking up in the universe; we feel large."

How many people don't like thinking about astronomy because it makes them feel small?  What does it have to do with science?  As I indicated yesterday, scientists are apt to brag that science is supposed to make us feel small, because religion supposedly makes us feel big -- but much of religion is devoted to quashing pride and reminding us of our smallness and insignificance before the Deity.  (Except when we make him mad -- then we're not so insignificant after all: our sinfulness puts all Heaven in a rage.)

Besides, if you feel large when you look up at the universe, something is wrong, because you are small, whether you're an astrophysicist or a pastry cook.  Tyson is saying that doing astrophysics fosters delusions of grandeur, which if true would discredit astrophysics, rather than recommend it.  Anyway, isn't science supposed to be about Finding the Truth and not about feeling big or small?

I've mentioned before the feminist historian of science Evelyn Fox Keller and her book Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death (Routledge, 1992).  Here's another bit from it that interested me, drawn from

the real lives of those contemporary scientists who got their start as boy scientists, producing explosives in their kitchens, bathrooms, or, if they were lucky, in a hand-fashioned basement laboratory.  (A generation ago, a common sideline of these basement laboratories used to be the production of “stink bombs” – ready to be set off by the young scientist whenever crossed by an uncooperative or angry mother.)  We are all familiar with the preoccupation many boys have with explosives, and with the great affective investment some of them show in producing bigger and more spectacular explosions – often indeed, continuing beyond boyhood into student days – but perhaps those of us who have spent time around places like MIT and Cal Tech are especially familiar with such behavioral/developmental patterns.  We would probably even agree that these patterns are more common in the early life histories of scientists and engineers than they are in the population at large.  Certainly, for the great majority of the scientists and engineers who started out life as play bomb experts, the energy invested in such primitive attempts at the resolution of early conflicts has been displaced onto mature creative endeavors that leave no trace of their precursors.  But in some cases, such traces are evident, even conspicuous.  As the result of a handy convergence between personal, affective interests and public, political, and economic interests, a significant number of these young men actually end up working in weapons labs (just how many would be interesting to document) – employing their creative talents to build bigger and better (real rather than play) bombs.  In other cases, traces of earlier preoccupations may be evoked only by particular circumstances – for example, the collective endeavor of a Manhattan Project.  The differences between these adult activities and their childhood precursors are of course enormous.  Yet it seems to me that the affective and symbolic continuity between the two nonetheless warrants our attention [49-50].

Just parenthetically, Keller reports that at Los Alamos, a successful bomb, a "bomb with 'thrust' [was] identified as a boy baby, while a girl baby [was] clearly identified as a dud" (50).

Anyway, this passage reminded me that even a sissy like me was fascinated by explosions when I was young.  I never built a basement lab to cook up my own explosives, but I loved cap pistols and fireworks.  Keller allows that many, perhaps most such boys outgrow their early fascination with things that go boom for "mature creative endeavors," though some move on "to build bigger and better (real rather than play) bombs."  I'm sure I recall a later passage in the book where, I thought, Keller mentioned that at Los Alamos, the physicists would relax on weekends by going into the desert to play with conventional explosives, but I can't find it now.  Looking around online, though, I found this more recent story:

Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico accidentally blew up a building on December 16 with a Civil War-style cannon. According to an occurrence report [pdf], which was first reported by the Project on Government Oversight, the lab's Shock and Detonation Physics team was testing a large-bore powder gun when they heard a "loud unusual noise."

About 20 minutes later, the researchers ventured out of their bunker to see what had happened. Upon further investigation of the facility’s Technical Area 15, the team discovered that Building 562 had been blown apart. Two doors were "propelled off the structure" and concrete shielding blocks were blasted off the walls. Parts of the cannon were also found lying on the asphalt nearby. The Facility Operations Director declared a "management concern" regarding the explosion. No-one was hurt, but sources told POGO that damages could cost $3 million. The lab reported that it has conducted a "critique" of the incident.

The reports give the impression that these "accidents" -- there are evidently quite a few of them -- occurred during regular research, but why would scientists at Los Alamos be working with, "testing", a "large bore powder gun"?  I suspect that they were just playing around and that a "loud unusual noise" was the aim of the exercise, not an accidental or unwanted side effect. Well, boys will be boys, eh?

The probability that many scientists were driven by a desire to make big booms and big stinks before they started seeking Truth doesn't in itself discredit science, but it does undermine scientists' pretensions to being above the irrationality of the stupid masses.  While I was working on this post I stepped into my local video emporium and saw that Neal DeGrasse Tyson's remake of Cosmos was playing.  Coincidentally (or was it?) I walked in on the segment on the Big Bang Theory that he'd told NPR about.  Tyson spoke slowly and sententiously, his big liquid eyes as full of staged sincerity as any televangelist's -- but then, that's what he is, a tv preacher bringing us the Good News according to Hawking and Darwin.  And his god (created, like all gods, in his own image) is a kid cooking up a Big Bang in the basement, so that he'll feel big.

Already It Was Impossible to Tell Which Was Which

Okay, I don't disagree that the Tea Party minority in the House who've shut the federal government down are bad people; their account of what is wrong with the government, and what would be a good government, is irrational, misinformed, dishonest, self-serving.  Is that understood?

Where I begin to part company with Democratic partisans is on their conviction that because their opponents are irrational, they must, by the process of elimination, be rational, well-informed, and concerned only with the common good.  Not only doesn't it follow logically, it's fairly obvious that many if not most Dems are fighting irrationality with irrationality, batshit crazy with batshit crazy.  And hell, I don't know, maybe that's the right thing to do.  The Tea Party's irrationality, combined with generous corporate support and the use of that support to do some grassroots organizing, has taken them pretty far.  I'd like to think it won't get them much farther, and that the present crisis will leave scorched earth behind it where the Republican Party formerly stood.  It would be even nicer if the Democrats learned something from the shutdown in their turn, and stopped trying to out-batshit the Right, but that of course would be irrational for me to believe.  It's "cynical," as I was told last week by one Obama devotee, to judge the Democrats by their record; it is not cynical to judge the Republicans by theirs.

So, I'm now seeing a meme featuring Elizabeth Warren denouncing the shutdown in these terms:

There's actually been some pushback against this one.  Some anarchists (and fellow-travelers like me) have pointed out that anarchism does not mean something like "every man for himself" (that would be free-market capitalism, as it's laughingly known), and that Warren is simply using the word to mean something like "uppity troublemakers I don't like," which is hardly a contribution to reasoned discourse.   (She doesn't like real anarchists anyway: she fell into the corporate elite line on the Occupy movement, for example.  But then so, in the end, did most mainstream Democrats.)

An old friend linked to a rant by a Methodist minister somewhere, and added his own layer of froth to it:

This is EXACTLY right. So much bull shit propaganda is speed out to the public as "facts". These are the real facts. The moderate - and trainable - on both sides need to come together to permanently oust these tea party legislative terrorists. It's time to take back our country with reason and compromise. These are NOT bad words and what WILL get our government working again.

"Moderate" is a "bad word," in my opinion, for reasons I've given before.  "Trainable" is even worse.  Just off the bat, who's going to do the training?  Our government wasn't founded to "train" us, or our elected representatives.  "Reason" is an okay word, but there's no reason in my friend's words.  "Compromise" is a bad word, since in practice what it has meant during the Obama administration is that the Republicans have been handed much of what they want, and are thereby emboldened to demand the rest of it later.  And it's hilarious of my friend (and he's far from alone among pious Democrats) to demand compromise, when both sides here are refusing to compromise.  That is not necessarily a bad thing, because there are times when one must not give in.  Obama and the Democrats have decided not to compromise any further on the Affordable Care Act.  Their supporters agree that they shouldn't.  So this time, right now, compromise is a bad word.

After a few snarling comments between us, my friend wrote exactly that: "There is no compromising on this issue," he wrote. Wait a minute, didn't you just demand compromise a few minutes ago?  Compromise isn't a bad word, and all that?  It's convenient, if not exactly gratifying, to have such a blatant textbook example of doublethink in action.

Then I got in e-mail a link to a Daily Kos post, "President Obama NAILS IT in one sentence," by a writer using the pixelname MinistryOfTruth.  Once again reality leaves satire gasping in the dust, since in Orwell's 1984 "The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture, and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink."  And credit where credit's due: the Daily Kos writer seems to have mastered doublethink in that pseudonym -- there's no indication that he or she is aware of the irony in that choice of name.

But I digress.  What is Obama's one sentence that NAILS IT?  "The American people elected their representatives to make their lives easier, not harder."  Okay, I know I'm like hypercritical, but I'm not impressed.  But Minitrue thinks it's so nice it should be quoted twice:

This is what a dying Republican party looks like. I'm glad President Obama has brought out the BIG STICK.

President Obama: The American people elected their representatives to make their lives easier, not harder

... though in neither case does that sentence, as quoted, end with a period.  As for "BIG STICK" -- no, I shouldn't, but I will anyway.  But I knew Sheriff Bart, and President Obama is no Sheriff Bart.  MinistryOfTruth returned to the BIG STICK in comments, again with remarkable unselfconsciousness.

"Millions of Americans voted for a government that makes our lives better, not harder," wrote Ministry of Truth.  But instead they got a government that entrenched health care in the hands of private corporate insurance companies, that refused to hold Wall Street accountable for the crash of 2008, continued and escalated wars that killed and injured more people of various nations and made the US more hated and therefore insecure, that capitulated in advance to the Republicans by extending upper-bracket tax cuts before negotiations on the stimulus had even begun (via), so that the economy continues to stagnate -- except for the very rich.  But then, the One Percent elected their representatives to make their lives easier, not harder; and President Obama is their representative, all that stands between them and the pitchforks and torches.

Though I'm the first to point out the limits of reason, reason is important to me.  When the Right mounts its deranged campaigns, I look to evidence and reason to try to keep my balance.  The Democrats, all too often, join the Republicans in hysteria and irrationality.

"The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought," Orwell also wrote in 1984.  Which party?  Both parties.  And they're winning.

Ours Not to Reason Why

My liberal law-professor friend passed this image along on Facebook today.  It's stuff like this (and there's a lot of it around) that produces the apathy I was complaining about yesterday.  I mean, why bother when so many of the people who are supposedly on my side are so damned, determinedly dumb?

Here's the thing: reason isn't something you wake up to.  It's something you have to work at, a skill that doesn't come all that naturally to human beings and must be developed.  As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in a passage I've quoted before:

The rational man seeks the truth gropingly, he knows that his reasoning is only probable, that other considerations will arise to make it doubtful; he never knows too well where he's going, he is "open," he may even appear hesitant But there are people who are attracted by the durability of stone. They want to be massive and impenetrable, they do not want to change: where would change lead them? This is an original fear of oneself and a fear of truth.  And what frightens them is not the content of truth which they do not suspect but the very form of the true -- that hinge of indefinite approximation.  It is as if their very existence were perpetually in suspension. They want to exist all at once and right away.  They do not want acquired opinions, they want them to be innate; since they are afraid of reasoning, they want to adopt a mode of life in which reasoning and research play but a subordinate role, in which one never seeks but that which one has already found, in which one never becomes other than what one originally was ...

Ludwig Wittgenstein said something along the same lines, chastising his former student Norman Malcolm:

... what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc. & if it does not improve your thinking about important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious ... You see, I know that it's difficult to think well about 'certainty,' 'probability,' 'perception,' etc. But it is, if possible, still more difficult to think, or try to think, really honestly about your life & other people's lives. And the trouble is that thinking about these things is not thrilling, but often downright nasty. And when it's nasty then it's most important.

But, like, who has time to think when there are more important things to dwell on, like sports or how adorable President Obama is, or how stupid those Bible-thumpers are, or how we need a woman president, preferably Hillary?  Learning to reason, learning to try to think honestly about your life is so tiring, and often it's a downer.  So let's accentuate the positive: It's much easier just to celebrate Reason Day.  It'll make you feel good, and isn't that the important thing?

More and Better Scientists

The Gallup organization reported earlier this month that 46% of Americans "hold [a] creationist view of human origins," and a number of pundits have reacted predictably enough.  Katha Pollitt was representative, though an Alternet post by Amanda Marcotte covering the same issue was republished at Salon today.  (It's not just an issue in the US: the Hankyoreh ran a story about science textbook controversies in South Korea the same day Pollitt's column appeared.)

Pollitt wrote that the "worst thing" about the poll results was "that the proportion of college graduates who are creationists is exactly the same as for the general public. That’s right: 46 percent of Americans with sixteen long years of education under their belt believe the story of Adam and Eve is literally true. Even 25 percent of Americans with graduate degrees believe dinosaurs and humans romped together before Noah’s flood. Needless to say, this remarkable demonstration of educational failure attracts little attention from those who call for improving our schools."  She might also have mentioned that 41 percent of Democrats believe in creationism, which is less than the 58 percent of Republicans who do, but still.  Only nineteen percent of Democrats are strict evolutionists, compared to five percent of Republicans.  That's a significant difference, but it shoots down any pretense by Democrats to be the party of rationality.

One thing that occurs to me about this is that Gallup reduced the creation/evolution debate to human origins.  Which is kind of like asking whether you believe that the earth is the center of the universe, while letting the rest of the planets orbit the sun.  Darwin's theory isn't just about human origins, it's about the origin of all species -- microbes, plants, animals.  It's the question of where people came from that seems to worry people more.  As Richard Lewontin pointed out years ago, there doesn't seem to be a corresponding drive to revise physics texts on the age of the universe -- which contrary to what Pollitt says, is not really a part of Darwin's theory.  The focus is on biology textbooks.  I'd say the same about the neo-Copernican synthesis: the Bible is pretty clear that the sun moves around the earth, but there's no religious drive in the US to give equal time to Biblical astronomy, or even Ptolemy's.

Marcotte inadvertently got closer to the nub of the matter, I think.  Her thesis is that we're seeing polarization in the politics of American science education, just as we are in other areas, though I'm not sure that follows from the Gallup data.  What's the middle ground here?  The number of people who believe in "theistic" evolution is higher -- twice as high, on the whole -- than the number of strict Darwinists; why aren't they the Truth That Lies Somewhere in Between the Two Extremes?  I'm sure that's how they largely see themselves, as reasonable moderates.

Anyway, Marcotte notes that at the same time as the number of Creationists has risen slightly,

there’s been a steady rise in people who believe that humanity evolved without any supernatural guidance, and now stands at 15 percent. What this seeming conflict suggests is that the issue is getting more polarized, as people feel they either have to pick Team Evolution or Team Creationism.

But she only really develops that insight where "Team Creationism" is concerned.  Team Evolution, she implies, judges the issue rationally, based on the evidence.

The theory of evolution isn’t being rejected on its merits by the people who don’t buy it. It really can’t be by someone who is honestly assessing the evidence.

We don't seem to have any evidence on why people accept the theory of evolution.  I'm certain that their reasons aren't as simple as an honest assessment of the evidence.  After all, one of the big issues at stake is what will be taught in the classroom.  When I took high school biology as a freshman in the mid-1960s, the class consisted of primarily memorization of classifications, and the dissection of a crayfish, then of a frog.  I don't remember covering Darwin and I doubt we did, since the teacher was a right-wing ideologue who wasted a lot of class time talking about the Communist threat, exemplified by Martin Luther King.  I never took any college science courses, but from the people I talked to who did, as well as what I've read about science education, the evidence for the theories underlying Chem Lab was not on the syllabus.  You learn science by doing science, not by studying its history.  Which is fine, but it means that the picture of people accepting evolution because they honestly assessed the evidence is not quite accurate.

That's what most advocates of teaching Darwinism have in mind, from what I've seen: they want students to be indoctrinated with the right theory.  Whenever I get the chance, I advocate the approach of teaching the conflicts, which is what is actually meant by assessing the evidence.  This generally infuriates the Darwinists I talk to.  Sometimes they point out that creationists have advocated the same thing, as though that mattered: that the Ku Klux Klan appeals to freedom of speech doesn't invalidate the First Amendment.  A more valid objection, to my mind, is that most high-school and probably college-level -- science teachers aren't competent to cover the evidence even for evolution, let alone the opposition.  That's not an indictment of science teachers, just a reminder that a sober assessment of evidence isn't involved in this controversy.

(Look at the comments under Marcotte's article at Salon.  There's a lot of endorsement of critical thinking, but precious little on display.  The same is true of religion vs. atheism, as I've said before: atheists are generally very misinformed about religion, but since they have the Truth they don't need no stinkin' information.  Attacking straw men is extremely common in scientific controversies, as in Steven Pinker's attempt to reduce the debate over the biology of behavior to a conflict between reasonable scientific evolutionary psychology on one side, and crazy "blank slate" dogma on the other; or Aaron Gillette's schema of evolutionary psychology vs. "behaviorism.")

I'd also like to know how many adherents of Darwin against creationism are actually Spencerians, who out of ignorance reject Darwin's actual theory of Descent with Modification by Natural Selection in favor of the inevitable progressive movement of the Life Force up the Great Chain of Being, from microbes to Man.  I'm sure it's a lot of them, maybe even most: Spencer's theory was especially popular in the US at the end of the 19th century, and his influence is still very much with us.  The trope of the "next step in evolution" turns up a lot in liberal discourse, along with the notion of evolution as forward progress, as with President Obama's "evolution" on same-sex marriage.  (The "next step" in evolution is often extinction, but few people like to dwell on that.)  To say nothing of the anthropomorphizing of Nature, or of the Earth.

Pollitt also flounders when she tries to explain why this bothers her so much.

One reason is that rejecting evolution expresses more than an inability to think critically; it relies on a fundamentally paranoid worldview. Think what the world would have to be like for evolution to be false. Almost every scientist on earth would have to be engaged in a fraud so complex and extensive it involved every field from archaeology, paleontology, geology and genetics to biology, chemistry and physics. And yet this massive concatenation of lies and delusion is so full of obvious holes that a pastor with a Bible-college degree or a homeschooling parent with no degree at all can see right through it.

For evolution to be false wouldn't logically entail that scientists who accept it are "engaged in a fraud"; they might just be drastically mistaken about it (because of their secular bias, creationists claim).  It wouldn't be the first time that the scientific consensus on a subject has been disastrously wrong.  Since fraud doesn't follow, I think Pollitt here lets slip that she believes Creationists are self-aware frauds, which I don't believe they are either.  A fundamentally paranoid worldview underlies a lot of anti-creationist rhetoric. "An inability to think critically" isn't involved either; everybody's critical thinking is partial at best, as Pollitt showed by her embrace of Obama in 2008.  And does Pollitt realize that what she wrote there echoes a common talking point of Christian apologetics?  Think of all the wise men over thousands of years who found Christianity to be reasonable and true; yet she thinks that a few malcontents can see right through it, and call gazillions of sincere Christians liars or fools.

Pollitt's fallen into the comfortable fallacy of the false antithesis, as she has before where science is concerned: if someone is critical of some aspect of contemporary science (except for anti-feminist biological determinism, of course), that means that they are anti-Science and don't believe that human beings are clever enough to learn anything about the world.  She knows better, but she shares the scientific triumphalism over primitive superstition that many atheists, especially of our generation, learned to take for granted as the inevitable next step in human progress.  Scientists have contributed a lot to human culture, but science still must be regarded critically, especially when it tries to claim authority outside its very limited realm.

It would be so much simpler if religious belief rendered a person totally incapable of functioning in the modern world, or in the sciences.  Yet fundamentalist Christians have had a powerful presence in the US space program since at least the 1950s, which didn't keep the US from beating the atheist Russians to the moon, and as the Gallup poll shows, many people simply blend theism and Darwinism together.  I reread the philosopher Mary Midgley's Evolution as a Religion (Methuen, 1985) this weekend, and she points out:

The effect [of academic specialization] is to leave many of today’s physical scientists rather unpracticed in general thinking, and therefore somewhat naïve and undefended against superstitions which dress themselves up as science. Creationism, for instance, cuts no ice at all with humanists and social scientists. Nobody trained to think historically is in any danger of taking it seriously, least of all theologians. It makes its academic converts among chemists and physicists – sometimes, alarmingly enough, even among biologists. Equally, the attitudes which will most concern us in this book – faith in future superman-building, faith in the mysterious force of bloody-minded egoism, fatalistic faith in chance, and various sub-faiths accompanying these – owe their success to the making of scientific-sounding noises without serious substance. This is a different group from that of scientists, but unfortunately it overlaps with it quite widely [24].

It's also a mistake to suppose that evolution has to be true, because of all the evidence around it.  Nineteenth-century physics was also a great achievement of human rationality, and its practitioners were sure of its truth.  It all came tumbling down when Einstein's theory of relativity superseded it, but that didn't mean nineteenth-century physicists were frauds or fools.  The mass of scientific knowledge was simply reorganized, under new management as it were.  The overturning of classical physics didn't mean a return to a geocentric Aristotelean cosmology, and when Darwinian theory is radically revised again (as it was in the 1930s), it won't prove that the Creationists were right all along either.

None of this means that I think Creationism is true, or that Darwinism shouldn't be taught in schools, or even that I'm not at all bothered by my fellow Americans' stubborn ignorance about science.  But they're ignorant about a good many things, including the religions they claim to love so much.  Pollitt brushes these considerations aside, but I don't see why.  The US still produces more scientists than it needs; if American corporations are hiring a lot of Asian scientists and engineers (whether trained here or in their home countries), it's because they're cheaper, not because of any shortfall in domestic production.  Pollitt and Marcotte both change the subject to climate change and global warming and OMFG the Republicans are anti-science!

Two things need to be borne in mind here: first, Democratic politicians have done no better than Republicans on environmental issues, undercutting world efforts to lower carbon emissions and the like; second, a lot of secular adherents of science agree that climate change is a problem, but they share Pollitt's confidence in Science's unlimited ability to fix our problems.  We don't need to scale back our energy consumption, they say, because soon we'll master cold fusion or some other technology, get rid of fossil fuels, and Presto! no global warming.  Anyone who lacks faith in this outcome is like people who laughed at Columbus or the Wright Brothers.

There's so much irrationality among the people who are nominally on my side that I can't get as excited as they want about the irrationality of the religious nuts.  A lot of their concern strikes me as a distraction.  We secularist self-styled rationalists need to work harder at putting our own house in order.

No Religion, Too; or, The Rapture of the Nerds

I'm reading another new book, The Seven Laws of Magical Thinking: How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healthy, and Sane by Matthew Hutson (Hudson Street Press).  I glanced at it, thought it had potential, and so far (about 80 pages in) it's turning out to be interesting.  Hutson is a popular science writer, with previous books about the moon and the sun to his credit.  This one is obviously a change for him, and it reads like he's personally invested in it, which is good.

Basically, his thesis, backed up by research studies, interviews with researchers, and anecdotes, is that magical thinking is part of being human, part of our evolutionary heritage, and as such it's double-edged: it can lead to destructive ideas and behavior, but it also has positive aspects.  In one sense this won't be news to evolutionary-psychology buffs, or to science buffs in general; but it may bother those who like to think of themselves as more evolved than the irrational many, and that if we try hard enough we can transcend our genetic programming -- which is a piece of magical thinking in itself.  Hutson holds that all of us are in the sway of magical thinking, and I think he's right.

One thing I like about the book is Hutson's humane generosity.  He begins by telling about the time, in 2006, John Lennon's piano (now owned by George Michael) was sent on a tour of the US.  "Free of velvet ropes, it could be touched or played by anyone," and it was (11).  No one made any claims for the piano, "but after playing it, people came away shaking and crying" (18).  It was the piano on which Lennon wrote "Imagine", and Hutson also quotes a 2006 interview in which Jimmy Carter told NPR, "[I]n many many countries around the world -- my wife and I have visited about 125 countries -- you hear John Lennon's song 'Imagine' used almost equally with national anthems" (17).  The story illustrates the way that people invest objects with essences.  Do you think it's only silly irrationalists who do that?  Silly you.

As Bruce Hood pointed out to me, in the documentary The Genius of Charles Darwin, [Richard] Dawkins embraces historicity by picking up a preserved pigeon at the Natural History Museum in Tring, England, and remarking, "It's a very weird feeling.  These are actually Darwin's own specimens." (Later in the documentary, Dawkins pulls a book off a shelf and says, "This is the most precious book in my collection.  It's a genuine first edition Origin of Species. ... This book made it possible no longer to feel the necessity to believe in anything supernatural") [16-17].

On the other hand, I've never considered Dawkins particularly rational anyhow.

Of course we project these essences onto these objects, that's the point.  Hutson discusses lots of studies which show it's virtually impossible not to do it.  (I admit I'm wary, though, because he seems to make the common error of supposing that because a large majority of people are susceptible to belief in pollution and the like, it's therefore universal.  I'd like to know more about the people who don't.  Maybe those who aren't susceptible to one form of magical thinking are susceptible to others.  It's not important, but I'm still curious.)

I thought this was especially suggestive, though:

In times of stress, when there's little room for error, we tend to buckle down.  One might think that on a bobbing ship hundreds of miles from land a sailor's grip on reality would tighten.  The Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski found that even the tribal Trobriand Islanders in the South Pacific rigorously adhered to practical considerations on the water.  "They have, in fact, a whole system of principles of sailing, embodied in a complex and rich terminology, traditionally handed on and obeyed as rationally and consistently as is modern science by modern sailors," he wrote.  "How could they sail otherwise under eminently dangerous conditions in their frail primitive craft?"

But he found that these dangerous conditions, which forced the fisherman to control every element of the mission they could, also drove them to seek control over things they couldn't.  "Even with all their systematic knowledge, methodically applied, they are still at the mercy of powerful and incalculable tides, sudden gales during the monsoon season and unknown reefs," he wrote.  "And here comes in their magic, performed over the canoe during its construction, carried out at the beginning and in the course of expeditions and resorted to in moments of real danger."

In contrast, Malinowski discovered that the safe and reliable practice of inner lagoon fishing featured very little magic.  Only the dangerous and uncertain nature of open-sea fishing brought out the spells [70-71].

This sort of thing is important to remember, because some secularists are prone to fall into either/or, all-or-nothing thinking: if you believe in gods or spirits or magic, then you don't believe in a physical world at all, and you think you can just walk on water.  But as the story of the Trobriand Islanders shows, a person who believes in magic can and does attend first to practical matters.  Magic is an attempt to protect against all the things that practical knowledge can't cover -- which is most of them. We moderns like to congratulate ourselves on how much more control we have over nature than our primitive ancestors did, but when you look at it from a larger perspective we haven't gained that much control at all.  Even on this planet we are still buffeted by weather and natural disasters, and our grand technology has accelerated climate change in ways that we can measure but not control, let alone reverse.  We haven't really mastered even our own tiny planet, and the universe is so vast we can't even imagine it.  Yes, we've learned a lot about our bodies and their ailments, but every time doctors start crowing about our triumph over disease, something new and nasty comes along that we can do nothing about.  And in the end, everybody dies.  Everybody.

You can argue about what a rational response to our smallness and mortality would be.  I feel sure that what it isn't, is the attempt to wish them away.  I'm thinking of Stephen Hawking, among others.  On his 70th birthday Hawking reiterated a concern he's evidently expressed many times.  "I don't think we will survive another thousand years without escaping beyond our fragile planet," he told the audience at his birthday celebration through his computer.  There are several kinds of magical thinking going on in that sentence: one is that "we" means the human species, and that the individual participates mystically in the survival of Homo Sapiens even though her body dies.  (I prefer Woody Allen's quip "I hope to achieve immortality by not dying."  Lots of luck in that endeavor, though.)  Another is that even if "we" destroy this planet, "we" can move on to another planet in another solar system -- assumed, in classic colonialist fashion, to be empty of people but still suitable for "us" to live on -- and smother it in smog, cigarette butts, and nuclear waste.  At which point we can blow it up and move on to the next one.  Yet another is the assumption that humans will and must avoid extinction forever, perhaps as genetically-engineered Omega Man and ultimately as software uploaded to a virtual cloud drive, which will last billions of years until the heat death of the universe and beyond.  There's more packed into those fifteen words, but that's enough to unpack for now.

I recently subscribed to a popular-science astronomy magazine, to bring myself up to date on the field.  The technology has certainly changed since I was reading books about grinding one's own telescope mirror as a teenager in the 1960s, and I am pleased by how much is being learned from the space telescopes.  But there's a lot of foolishness too.  Remember when Pluto was "demoted" from planet to dwarf planet?  A lot of people, including Matthew Hutson, are still fuming about it, and I've seen the fallout in the magazines.  The current issue has a cover story on "How we are going to travel to the nearest star (No kidding)."  No kidding, maybe, but it's a scam.  The article explains the unimaginable distances involved, the present lack of any workable vehicle to get human beings there, and then finesses the gap between where we are now and where we need to be to even try. (One graphic attending the article is titled, "Exploring the Neighborhood," which is a magnificent example of magical thinking itself: if we just think of a distance of 25 trillion miles as "the neighborhood," crossing it will be like a walk around the block.)

O'Neill also points out that fusion propulsion may be too violent for any passengers on such a ship.  "Humans are soft and squishy, so accelerating an interstellar craft to huge speeds rapidly may [!] be detrimental to the health of those on board."  And then there's the issue of radiation (also a problem for fission-based propulsion), which would require significant shielding.  These all amount to engineering issues, though, meaning they're likely to be overcome sooner than later, making fusion the propulsion method of choice.

The little fusion-propelled space ship that could!  I think I can, I think I can for 30,000 years or so, and your seed-ship will be looking at a new world.  Several writers, none of them Luddites, have pointed out the practical difficulties that stand between Man and the Stars.  The most remarkable thing is the reactions they got in comments: many space enthusiasts were not only critical but upset and hostile.  Often the objections were along the lines of You aren't thinking big enough, all we need to do is develop a solar sail, and it'll pull a giant space colony to Alpha Centauri!  (Here's a good example.  Or this one -- but there's an embarrassment of riches. The subtitle of this post comes from this one.)  You'd think someone had told them that there's no Santa Claus, or that Pluto wasn't a planet.

The science fiction that thrilled so many people from the 1930s until the first moon landing in 1969 got around the difficulties with similar hand-waving: faster than light travel, space warps, wormholes, singularities, warp drive, etc.  It became easy to think of interstellar, even intergalactic voyages as feasible, just a jump here and a warp transition there, not different from Columbus crossing the Atlantic except in degree.  And "hard" science fiction, with its editors' and writers' insistence that they stuck to real scientific possibilities, either kept that promise and wasn't very glamorous, or cheated.  It was fiction, after all, but many fans began to think of it as reality, a future history instead of allegories.

Going back to Matthew Hutson, though, all of this becomes more understandable once you recognize the pervasiveness of magical thinking, even or especially among those who fondly believe themselves free of it.  It likely is part of our evolutionary heritage, and as such, evolutionary psychologists should embrace its inevitability and even its benevolence.  Even if they don't like it, we won't be able to change it until we  can change the human genome.  (I'm alluding mischievously to evolutionary psychologists' handwringing over male sexual aggression.)  It's not surprising that, faced with a dangerously damaged planet or even our own individual mortality, many people will seek to get a sense of control by fantasizing about colonizing the stars, or uploading themselves to a silicon brain.  Or even that the computers will take care of us.  The project of human mastery over nature is itself a product of magical thinking.

Believing What You Know Ain't So

I just finished reading Bruno Latour's On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (Duke, 2010), and am still stirring it around in my head. Latour is (in)famous as an anthropologist of science, whose fieldwork consists of observing the savage scientist in his natural habitat, the laboratory. I haven't yet read any of that work; all I'd read before was We Have Never Been Modern (Harvard, 1993), whose title signaled to me that the author was someone whose ideas would make sense to me; and so it proved.

Here's a nice passage from the newer book, which caught my attention after I listened last night to three people on the community radio station talking about ancient astronauts and the like. None of them believed that the Great Pyramid was built by extraterrestrials, because that wouldn't be scientific; yet I got the impression that they believed that extraterrestrials had crashed at Roswell and been sequestered at Area 51.

Does the only example of naïve belief we have, then, come from a naïve belief on the part of researchers that ignorant people believe naively? Not quite, for ignorant people do exist who quite resemble the picture that researchers would like to paint of them. Photographers of flying saucers, archaeologists of cities lost in space, zoologists tracking the Yeti, people who have been contacted by little green men, creationists fighting against Darwin – all the sorts of people that Pierre Lagrange studies with a collector’s passionate interest – are all trying to pin down entities that seemingly display the same properties of existence, the same specifications as entities that, according to the epistemologists, come from laboratories. Curiously enough, these people are called “irrationalists,” whereas their greatest fault comes more from the reckless trust they display in a scientific methodology, dating to the nineteenth century, in order to explore the only mode of existence they are able to be imagine: that of the thing, already there, present, stubborn, waiting to be pinned down, known. No one is more positivistic than creationists or ufologists, since they cannot even imagine other ways of being and speaking than describing “matters of fact.” No researcher is that naïve, at least not in the laboratory. This is so much the case that, paradoxically, the only example of naïve belief we have seems to come from the irrationalists, who are always claiming that they have overthrown official science with stubborn facts that some conspiracy had hidden away [44].

The last section of the book is a sermon on the relation between science and religion, and even though I disagree rather vehemently with a lot of what he says there, he still raises valuable questions and points to important problems. And I appreciate the almost Wildean paradoxes he plays with, which (as he admits) catch him in his own contradictions.

What would happen to me if, in criticizing the critics, I was simply trying to create another scandal? What if this essay, in its pretension to re-describe iconoclasm, was nothing but another boring iconoclastic gesture, another provocation, the mere repetition of the endless gesture of the intelligentsia’s most cherished treasures? We don’t know for sure [88].

And:

… it is science that reaches the invisible world of beyond, that ... is spiritual, miraculous, soul-fulfilling, and uplifting; it is religion which should be qualified as being local, objective, visible, mundane, un-miraculous, repetitive, obstinate, and sturdy [111].

And:

What I have argued in this lecture is very different: belief is a caricature of religion exactly as knowledge is a caricature of science. Belief is patterned after a false idea of science, as if it were possible to raise the question “Do you believe in God?” in the same way as “Do you believe in global warming?” except the first question does not possess any of the instruments that would allow the reference to move on, and that the second is leading the interlocutor to a phenomenon even more invisible to the naked eye than God, since to reach it we have to travel through satellite imaging, computer simulation, theories of earth atmospheric instability, or high stratosphere chemistry [121].

I'll probably have occasion to refer to Latour again, but for now it's time to hit the sack.

Be Rational, or the Gobble-uns Will Get You!

I'm reading Marge Piercy's The Art of Blessing the Day: Poems with a Jewish Theme (Knopf, 1999), and one poem, "For each age, its amulet," took me back to the question of rationality. By contrast with the precautions her grandmother urged on her ("Circle yourself with salt and pray"), Piercy points to the fears and rituals of our modern, scientific society:

By building containers of plutonium
with the power to kill for longer than humans
have walked upright, demons are driven off.
Demons lurk in dark skins, white skins
demons speak another language, have funny hair.
Very fast planes that fall from the sky
regularly like ostriches trying to fly, protect.
Best of all is the burning of money ritually
in the pentagon shaped shrine. In Langley
the largest prayer wheel computer recites spells
composed of all words written, spoken, thought
tapped and stolen from every living person.

One of the perils of thinking yourself rational is that you ignore your own irrationality. As I commented at another blog, "rationality" is something you do, not something you are. No one is perfectly rational all of the time. Compare these observations from Joanna Russ's 1972 review of the science-fiction novel Moderan by David Bunch (collected in The Country You Have Never Seen, University of Liverpool Press, 2007, page 74):

We all know that Reason is superior to Emotion. (After all, look where it’s got us.) And that souls ride inside bodies, like people inside Edsels, right? And that Edsels often break down, leaving us to cry like Saint Paul, Who will deliver me from the body of this death? I have actually met engineers who told me (in all sincerity) that they lived their lives according to the dictates of Reason, and when I got them enraged – which is easy to do – they told me I was irrational. In Love and Will Rollo May describes a patient of his, a chemist, who had invented the perfect daydream erection: a metal pipe extending from his brain directly through his penis. The rest of his body was irrelevant.

And as David Noble wrote in The Religion of Technology: the Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (Knopf, 1997, pages 113-14),

The apocalyptic outlook of the weapons-designers is, in essence, no different from that of evangelists: the expectation of inevitable doom. And here too anticipation of annihilation of “blended” with a belief in salvation. For the weapons-designers, the bomb is a means not only of destruction but of deterrence, defense, and deliverance. If nuclear weaponry does not deter attack, it might defend at least some of the species from earthly extinction. And if that too fails, it might be used instead to propel a privileged few scientific saints to safety among the stars. For all their claims of building bombs to avoid disaster, at least some of the nuclear community were hedging their bets by seeking yet another form of technological transcendence, their own technical version of the Rapture: nuclear-powered spaceflight.

Bear in mind that there was never any possibility of getting significant numbers of human beings "to safety among the stars": the fantasy was that the Elect (the scientific self-chosen) would seed the stars with their superior genetic material.

Coming Up Snake Eyes

I'm currently rereading two books: Fred L. Pincus's Reverse Discrimination: Dismantling the Myth (Boulder: Rienner, 2003), and Mary Midgley's Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and its Meaning (Routledge, 1992). Midgley is an interesting character, and though I have some disagreements with her she's one of my favorite living philosophers. She has the distinction, minor though significant, of having hurt Richard Dawkins's feelings in what Dawkins called a "highly intemperate and vicious paper", and I'd love her if she'd never done anything but goad that pot into calling the kettle black. Besides that, and more important, I've learned a lot from her, and I hope I'll be as lucid at 90 as she is.

Anyway. On page 14 of Science as Salvation Midgley quoted C. S. Lewis (from Christian Reflections, page 89):

We find that matter always obeys the same laws which our logic obeys ... No one can suppose that this can be due to a happy coincidence. A great many people think that it is due to the fact that Nature produces the mind. But on the assumption that Nature is herself mindless, this provides no explanation. To be the result of a series of mindless events is one thing; to be a kind of plan or true account of the laws according to which these mindless events happen is quite another ...

Unless all that we take to be knowledge is an illusion, we must hold that in thinking we are not reading rationality into an irrational universe, but responding to a rationality with which the universe has always been saturated.

I think Lewis has it backwards here: why not say that logic obeys the same laws matter does?  Lewis seems to be falling prey to the Shabby Friar fallacy, where one marvels that the Lord has so arranged things that rivers flow past the larger towns.  He also conveniently ignores traditional Christian polemic against logic, "the Devil's bride, Reason, that pretty whore" as Martin Luther called it.

Earlier, on page 12, Midgley had repeated a famous anecdote about Albert Einstein's resistance to the indeterminacy of quantum theory:

Disturbed by the implication of real disorder in Bohr's interpretation of quantum mechanics, Einstein said, 'God does not play dice'. Bohr replied, 'Einstein, stop telling God what to do.'

Midgley says that those who tell this story "seldom offer a carefully secular paraphrase to show just what [Bohr] had established, nor do they explain why this language struck these great men as so well fitted for their purpose." What occurred to me as I read it, and again when I turned the page to read Lewis's remarks about a rational universe, was that this was the only time I've encountered Bohr's rejoinder to Einstein's quip. Probably I just hadn't been paying enough attention. (In Rebecca Goldstein's philosophical novel The Mind-Body Problem [Penguin reprint, 1993], the narrator says that later in life, Einstein conceded, "Who knows, maybe He is a little malicious" [225-6].)

Einstein's position was circular: he didn't believe that God played dice with the universe because his concept of God, like that of the heretical seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, was deterministic, and he held "that a person's actions were just as determined as that of a billiard ball, planet or star. 'Human beings in their thinking, feeling and acting are not free but are as causally bound as the stars in their motions,' Einstein declared in a statement to a Spinoza Society in 1932." He rejected the notion of a personal "deity who could meddle at whim in the events of his creation. ... Scientists aim to uncover the immutable laws that govern reality, and in doing so they must reject the notion that divine will, or for that matter human will, plays a role that would violate this cosmic causality." But this was Einstein's conviction, one that he shared with many other scientists, not the result of his scientific work but a preconception he brought to it. It looks like C. S. Lewis, who thought of matter obeying "the same laws which our logic obeys", agreed with Einstein on this issue.

On the other hand, I can see that for many people, theist and non-theist alike, an impersonal universe is too disturbing to face. Later in Science and Salvation, Midgley notes that for some scientists "the prospect of an eventual end to human life, however distant, is so awful as to deprive life now of all meaning. And the belief that some kind of post-human being, somehow produced by us, will in some sense survive seems to [them] enough to render it meaningful again" (21). Which reminds me of Wittgenstein's rhetorical question about 'eternal life' in the Tractatus (6.3412), "[I]s some riddle solved by my surviving for ever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life?" I've noticed that quite a number of science fans believe, against all likelihood, that the human race will survive until the Heat Death of the universe, which is not expected for a few billion years yet, and are eager for us to migrate throughout the universe to make sure that the human race won't die out when we blow up this planet. (As though we wouldn't do the same to the new places we moved to.)

A good many people look to belief in God for stability in the world, to give them absolutes, to give them a reliable ground for their values and other beliefs. Such people seem to think that if there's no god, the universe is chaos. "If there is no God, then everything is permitted!" Dostoevsky warned in The Brothers Karamazov. Maybe so, but you'd never conclude that from looking at how people, including Christians, imagine their gods. (I've argued that if God exists, just about everything is permitted.) Maybe God does play dice with the world; Christians and Jews attribute a great deal of not just irrationality, but outright capriciousness to their god. God works in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform, etc. -- there's a rich vein of proverbial lore about how irrational God is, and I don't find that comforting.

In his book Critique of Religion and Philosophy (Harper, 1958), for example, the philosopher Walter Kaufmann retold a rabbinical parable in which God shows Moses a vision of the second-century rabbi Akiba, who was martyred by the Romans. Akiba interprets the Torah so wonderfully that Moses marvels, "Lord of the world, you have such a man and yet you gave the Torah through me?" "Be still," God replies, "that is how it entered my mind." Moses asks God to show him Akiba's reward for knowing the Torah so well, and God shows him Akiba's horrible death. Shocked, Moses protests: "This is the Torah, and this is its reward?" "Be still," God replies, "that is how it entered my mind." (Notice that in this story God does not reply that Akiba's martyrdom wasn't his fault, that he couldn't interfere with anybody's free will, that he suffered along with [and even more than] Akiba -- he declares that it was his whimsical doing.)

Worse yet, mythology about every god I've ever heard of depicts them as erratic, vengeful, malignant -- Yahweh as abusive husband, for example, in the Hebrew Bible, or as abusive father in the New Testament. And who knows? Maybe this is the true state of the world. My point is that a personal God, like the god of Judaism and Christianity, gives no warrant for a secure, stable, rational world. I think his existence would make the world no less frightening than his non-existence would. If the universe is orderly, it doesn't need a god to run it; if it's chaotic, I'm not reassured that it entered Someone's mind to make it that way. When I consider the images of divine beings that human beings have created, or the distant scientific futures they've imagined, I wonder what kind of "meaning" they're looking for.